Life in the suburbs was good, until it wasn't
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- December 25, 2019
- 869
Memories are slippery, malleable and altogether necessary things.
They decorate the past even as they inform the present and can, on occasion, predict if not the future, then certainly its possibilities.
When I sat down to write this piece, I had every intention of sharing a warm holiday tale filled with Rudolph and Frosty, comfort and joy, gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Instead, you’re going to read about the time Santa was kidnapped.
Oh, don’t worry.
It’s not like me to plunge the depths of human evil. There’s too much of it in the world today, anyway. And it would serve no purpose, other than reiterate what we already know in our hearts: that things have to get better because they can’t get worse.
Famous last words, eh?
I grew up in a post-WWII subdivision we’ll call Irish Acres, a place filled with pretty two-story homes, neat and tidy lawns, smooth sidewalks, and lots and lots of children. Dads went to work while moms tended to the kids, doctors made house calls, fresh milk was delivered straight to the door and the elementary school was just across the street.
Irish Acres had bridge clubs and baseball teams, holiday parades and trick-or-treat, tree-lined cul-de-sacs and an ice cream man who timed his neighborhood circuits to coincide with the moments when mothers served their families lime green Jell-o for dessert.
The guy was a genius.
I mean who wouldn’t want a sky-blue Popsicle, instead?
At Christmastime, Irish Acres almost always had snow, and sons would help their fathers to shovel out their driveways even as they had trudged through the drifts to help Dad select the perfect tree, growing free and wild and ready for its place of honor in the home.
Oh, there was measles and mumps and chicken pox, every now and again a bloody nose, and once in a while a broken bone, but casts on a limb created a sort of neighborhood celebrity, a badge of courage, especially if a bike crash was involved.
We had Kool-Aid stands and slip-and-slides, we traded baseball cards on front stoops, we went to church every Sunday, and our knees went weak when the cutest girl in third grade smiled at you.
Irish Acres may not have been the most perfect place to grow up, but I’d argue it was darn close.
Which is why the kidnapping of Santa Claus came as such a shock.
Things like that just didn’t happen in Irish Acres, or so we thought.
Crimes like that were the stuff of TV shows, and everyone knew all that junk was make-believe, unless it involved astronauts.
Even those early space shots drew skepticism in my circle of friends, where the consensus was unless it was featured on Chiller Theater, it was a con meant for suckers.
Because we believed in Frankenstein and the Wolfman, Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Mummy and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
We bought magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and built models of our favorites that lined our bedroom shelves.
Reality came in designated doses, like St. Joseph’s Children’s Aspirin, which we swallowed without complaint, knowing that moms always knew best, despite what dads might say.
Irish Acres wasn’t meant to be a matriarchal society, but in all practical ways of measuring such a nebulous construct, it was.
Mothers did all the heavy lifting, beginning of course with the actual birthing of the children. This was eons before fathers ever even considered the possibility of being right there in the maternity unit, coaching breathing exercises and taking part in the delivery.
Back then husbands paced the waiting room floors like, well, expectant fathers, then passed out cigars with “It’s a Boy!” printed on the bands. They hugged their wives and then, well, went back to work, earning enough money to keep Irish Acres vibrant and full.
I’ve been told by those in the know that I wasn’t an ideal older brother when my sister made her appearance in our tidy two-dormered Cape Cod that we called home. Seems I had serious issues with sharing center stage with an interloper from the stork.
But as with all things in Irish Acres, I soon adapted and became a sort of protector, if not a guardian angel, then a better big brother.
And 18 months or so later, along came the littlest brother, and that was us, we five, a nuclear family that would survive intact for almost 25 years.
By the time Mom died on New Year’s Day 1981, we’d long since left Irish Acres behind, and most of its memories were ever-standing and established, fixed stars in our collective heavenly sky.
But then there was the whole Kidnapped Santa story.
Here’s what I remember.
We had just finished riding around the neighborhood, looking at all the decorations — the lights and the mangers, the sleighs and the reindeer — and it was already dark, night falling so fast on Christmas Eve it was as if someone tugged on a string.
I was in the backseat, behind my father who was driving, sitting next to my sister, our brother in Mom’s arms, child-safety seats being an innovation that wouldn’t arrive for many, many years.
I looked out the window to my left, and there, in an idling car, I saw Santa being wrestled this way and that, struggling against some unseen force that was trying to remove his beard. It was scary, and it seemed to go on for a long time, though being stopped at a red light, it couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds or so.
But what I saw electrified me: I can still see it, illuminated by the dome light in the car next to ours, Santa trying to hang on to his hat and his red suit, even as something — or someone — tried to keep him still. At one point he looked over at me, and I could have sworn he was asking for my help.
But I was like 4 years old. What could I have done?
Christmas came as always the next morning, and Santa must have been safe, or else all those presents wouldn’t have been waiting.
In the years since I’ve developed a theory on what I witnessed that Christmas Eve: To wit, the man in the car next to ours had served as Santa for his office’s Christmas party and he was only trying to shed his costume before he got home to his wife and family.
Remember this: What happened in Irish Acres stays in Irish Acres.